Sin City is probably the best-looking film that will be released this year. It’s also the most hard-boiled film to come out of Hollywood in quite a while.
Given those facts, I should love it, and be telling you to see it. Instead, I’m calling it an interesting failure. Why? A whole host of reasons.
Part of Sin City’s problem is that it’s too attached to its graphic novel roots. While the resulting stylisation can often be excellent, it can also be jarring and spoils the audience’s suspension of disbelief. The script lacks real finesse, too, with a lot of very stagy dialogue.
Maybe the biggest, problem, though, is the queasy mixture of cartoonishness and extremely graphic violence. They don’t sit well together, and one detracts from the other quite frequently. There’s also the question of the female characters: at what point does referencing the misogyny of classic film noir turn into just being really misogynistic? Don’t even get me started on the “Oriental Ninja/Whore” archetype.
But for all that, there is a lot still to like about Sin City. There are places where the script is suitably Chandleresque, and there isn’t a bad performance in the film: Clive Owen, Bruce Willis and Mickey Rourke are superb, especially Rourke. The visuals are good, and the film’s cynical attitude is very refreshing after endless clean-cut action films.
So I can’t unequivocally recommend this one. Don’t go and see it if you aren’t OK with film violence, but do see it if you’re a fan of hard-boiled crime drama, or just want to see an interesting experiment in bringing graphic novels to the screen.
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